Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

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EVENTS

How else can you explain someone faced with empirical evidence that children are being infected with a preventable disease, thanks to anti-vaccination anti-science, claiming it’s all a hoax?

Damn it all. Maybe we deserve our fate, as a race, to succumb to some pandemic or other humanity-endangering event, because of certain humans spreading misinformation in order to line their own pockets. When the stakes are human lives, how can we as a species continue when we’re willing to throw others’ lives away for our own enrichment?

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You might have noticed that most of the work I’ve put into the blog lately has been to the end of promoting Geek Girl Con. This post is no different, save for a bit of complaining.

Honestly, I haven’t had much time for blogospherics lately, as work has had a series of disasters that I’ve had to mitigate, so I’ve been working my ass off. I’ve been venting my frustrations about current real-world events on Twitter in short form, because that seems easier to handle in the midst of jumping from one crisis to another with work, but the blog has lain fallow for too long, so I decided to cross-purpose a bit of work I did today. Why use something you’ve done once, when you can use it twice?

At Geek Girl Con, I’m going to be working in the DIY Science Zone, teaching a thing or two about randomness, especially as pertains to dice. I’ll be performing a few demonstrations of how humans don’t really grok randomness, including one where I’ll get people to draw fifty random dots on a piece of paper. I’ll then compare them to a better (though still not perfect) pseudo-random generator, a computer.

Then I’ll go on to talk about how this universe is deterministic and randomness really isn’t all that random no matter what we do to generate it, and pretend to be all smart and stuff. We’ll see how that works out.

I’ve written a little Python script to help with the first demonstration I mentioned above. Here it is. It uses the fairly standard Pygame init > run > terminate main loop you might see in other examples.[Read more…]

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Thanks to an anonymous and unbelievable donation to Geek Girl Con of $2000 (SERIOUSLY, someone must REALLY hate me!), the $5000 mark has been blown past for fundraising for the DIY Science Zone. Therefore, this Sunday, starting at noon CST, I’ll be playing Battletoads on twitch.tv, beginning to end, no warps, with unlimited lives. Unless it goes over 12 hours, I have work in the morning — in which case I’ll make a save state and continue next weekend.

This is easily one of the hardest video games of the Nintendo era, owing mostly to its punishing memorization sequences, and its brutal one-hit kills (not to mention the inherent imprecision of the NES controller’s directional pad plus-shape design). This was “I Wanna Be The Guy” hard long before there was such a thing.

Here’s how this game is NOT going to go: a cheat-free perfect speedrun.

Instead, it’ll be me failing over and over and over again at this, since I’ve not played past the first level since I was 14-ish.

Oh how I dread and loathe this.

There are more Acts of Whimsy from scientists at the DIY Science Zone at Geek Girl Con, too! If you’d like to donate, try the below button:

Remember, if we get to $5000, I’ll be playing Battletoads, beginning to end, with infinite lives, on twitch.tv. Surely you’ll want to see me get progressively more and more frustrated as I replay sections of the game over, and over, and over again. Donate now to punish me!

(We totally did not coordinate the silent movie thing in advance, I swear.)

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This was a fun panel about the cognitive dissonance and shared delusion necessary to believe in astrology despite all of science’s advances. It was a bit raucaus at times, but we had good audience participation and Brianne had some hilarious points throughout, relieving me of my usual role as snarker. With a real-life astronomer and two science teachers — one tenured, one a teacher-in-training — this panel covered all the perspectives. Well, except for the perspectives of true-believer. No wait, Nicole admitted to having been one herself at one point! So it covered all the perspectives! Yeah!

We’ll explore the myths and beliefs of astrology and why some people still find it convincing in the modern age of science.

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It’s gotten so’s I gotta put a year in the title to make it unique! How weird is that.

My CONvergence schedule is a bit thicker this year than in years past — I’m invited to participate in six panels. That’s a record for me! One of them is even my own brain-baby — the Superheroes in our Modern Day Pantheons panel.

And as usual, I’ll be hanging out in the FtB / Skepchicks “party” rooms wherein we’ll not actually be partying, but rather fending off constant attacks from the encroaching Royal Manticorian Army and Klingon rooms. Also, there will be science sandboxes, commisserating with like-minded individuals, and modest amounts of alcohol to lubricate the conversation. I might also provide hilariawful Bible games on the big-screen TV, e.g. Super Noah’s Ark 3D, if I can manage a better setup than last year.

Nobody really worships Hercules or Thor as Greek and Norse gods anymore, but don’t despair, because now they’re both members of The Avengers. This panel will explore the commonalities and differences between our ancient and modern pantheons.

When people abuse anonymity to give hurtful, damaging criticism, is this merely a failure of empathy, or is there something more there? How do you criticize people without triggering a flame war? Should you even TRY to avoid flame wars?

Criticism and even rage blazing across social media has proven remarkably effective in getting complaints heard, but what are the downsides? How do we maintain communities when anger and volume get things done?

From alligators in the sewer to clowns in the attic, urban legends walk the line between total absurdity and being just so outrageous that they might be true. Where do these stories come from, and why do they capture our imaginations so effectively?

I just had a minor bit of unpleasant SIWOTI, only in meatspace instead of On The Internet. I don’t think I handled it entirely appropriately but that’s mostly because as a nerd, these things do matter to me. But interacting with other people also matters to me.

Caribou Coffee is a local answer to Starbucks that falls about halfway between Tim Horton’s and Starbucks on the scale of fancy-fancy frou-frou (which is a scalar value, obviously). They have a trivia question on a chalkboard next to their menu every day, and getting it right will knock ten cents off your order. It’s not a big deal, but it’s a fun little thing. Today’s question was: “What is Mars’ gravitational pull (relative to Earth’s)?”[Read more…]

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Tia Beaudoin, a recent Political Science Honours graduate at University of New Brunswick, has kindly offered her thesis as a series of guest blog posts on the subject of the abortion policy in NB, with particular regard to the laws that have resulted in abortion being virtually inaccessible for much of the Maritimes.

As an editor’s note, I should point out that Dr. Henry Morgentaler died last May, and after his death, the clinic he founded in New Brunswick — which he’d been fighting to force the government to cover the costs of the procedures done there in the courts over the last 11 years — was forced to close for lack of funding, despite the Canada Health Act requiring funding of abortions. The provincial government, thanks to Regulation 84-20, only covers funding for abortions recommended by two doctors as “medically necessary” — a law that makes it nearly impossible to obtain the two doctors’ sign-off during the mandated first twelve weeks of the woman’s pregnancy. Those two facts essentially make it impossible to get medical funding, and the clinic under Morgentaler had mandated to never turn away a woman in need. As a result, it has lost close to $100,000 over the past ten years.

Change is inevitable for New Brunswick; the only thing the provincial government can do is slow that change down, although resisting change comes at the high cost of restrictions being placed upon women’s rights and health care. Many who are following the ongoing Morgentaler v. New Brunswick case speculate that the provincial government is stalling the case because they are waiting for Morgentaler to die, as he is growing older and in ill health. If this happens, the case will dissolve and if someone else were to wish to continue with that case they would need to start from the beginning. Even if Morgentaler dies before the case is over, the human rights complaint will still be processed, attacking Regulation 84-20 from the physician’s side rather than from a women’s rights standpoint. Regardless, it is only a matter of time before the federal government chastises New Brunswick for not properly adhering to the Canada Health Act, however this will likely not happen while Prime Minister Harper is in office. I believe the likelihood of the federal government deducting from New Brunswick’s Canada Health Transfer would be increased under a Liberal or New Democratic government, as those parties are far less socially conservative by definition than Canada’s current government.[Read more…]

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Tia Beaudoin, a recent Political Science Honours graduate at University of New Brunswick, has kindly offered her thesis as a series of guest blog posts on the subject of the abortion policy in NB, with particular regard to the laws that have resulted in abortion being virtually inaccessible for much of the Maritimes.

As an editor’s note, I should point out that Dr. Henry Morgentaler died last May, and after his death, the clinic he founded in New Brunswick — which he’d been fighting to force the government to cover the costs of the procedures done there in the courts over the last 11 years — was forced to close for lack of funding, despite the Canada Health Act requiring funding of abortions. The provincial government, thanks to Regulation 84-20, only covers funding for abortions recommended by two doctors as “medically necessary” — a law that makes it nearly impossible to obtain the two doctors’ sign-off during the mandated first twelve weeks of the woman’s pregnancy. Those two facts essentially make it impossible to get medical funding, and the clinic under Morgentaler had mandated to never turn away a woman in need. As a result, it has lost close to $100,000 over the past ten years.

Under the Canadian constitution, legislation, regulation, insuring of medical procedures is strictly under provincial jurisdiction.1 The federal Canada Health Act legislates that all provinces must cover medically necessary procedures within their respective provincial health insurance plans in order to be eligible for the Canada Health Transfer; which is a fund given by the federal government to provincial governments to help supplement provincial medical insurance payments among other things. Within the following chapter I will detail the government of New Brunswick’s problematic interpretation of the federal legislative void in which abortion has existed since 1988. 2 Included in this will be an explanation of the relevant court cases ongoing in the province. I will also discuss how the province has continued to be unpunished for its disregard of the Canada Health Act, although the federal government has full knowledge of New Brunswick’s transgressions. In addition I will conclude by discussing the importance of clinic abortion access, along with the numerous benefits these clinics can provide both to the government and to women in New Brunswick. New Brunswick’s abortion policy is operating in contravention to women’s Charter rights on several levels, and is extremely inaccessible when compared to many other Canadian provinces.[Read more…]